The landscape of social media is anything but straightforward:

1. Social media continues to evolve and change not only each day, but sometimes hourly. Unlike the photo above, social media and networking is not “written in stone” or constant by any means. Social network sites, wikis, blogs and microblogs, and bookmarking sites appear, evolve and sometimes disappear overnight.

2. As suggested in #1 above, social media and networking refers to a large number of potential activities on the net. Here is a brief list of the possibilities:

Personal Social Network Sites: These are sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn where like individuals can connect either individually or through membership in one or more groups.

Focused (Wine) Social Network Sites: These are sites such as Adegga, Snooth, MustLovewine, Wine2.0 and many others whose members focus on wine in general. Here too there are groups within these sites that focus on specific aspects of wine such as tasting, varietals, distribution, etc.

Blogs and microblogs: Blogs are sites that “talk about” a particular subject (like ViralVines.com!. )In the case of wine it could be focused on value priced bottlings, varietals, wines from a particular region, winemaking, wine tasting, etc., or a combination of one or more of the above. Examples include Fermentation, ThinkWine, Dr. Vino, and many more. There are also microblog sites, the best known being Twitter, where in 140 characters or less a message (tweet) can be sent to 100 or 100o or 10000 followers multiple times a day.

 Media Sites: These  include sites for video upoad and review (YouTube, kyte), photos (zoomr, flickr), or audio (BlogTalkRadio, graperadio).

Wikis and White Label Social Networks: Wikis (pbwiki, wikipedia) are communities where users contribute directly to the site. White label Social Networks (Ning) allow anyone to build or start up a social network.

Collaborative tools: These are sites that support online collaboration including planning, calenders, and email such as Zoho, Zimbra, and Google (tools), as well as tools to support online events such as Webex, eventful, and zvents.

The key to successfully adding social media to your overall marketing is:

• ensure social media is not a separate activity; it needs to be an integral part of your overall marketing plan and activities
• understand (assess) where you are and what you expect from social media (set clear and measurable goals),
• understand the social media landscape – use tools such as mind mapping to help
• decide on how much or how little to invest in order to achieve the goals (where will you participate and how often),
• and then measure results.

Finally, you need to revise your activities based on your measurements. For instance, if you have decided to engage with multiple wine social networks and you realize through analysis that only two are providing the results you have set, you may want to drop activity on those that are not performing for you, and focus on only those two or investigate other potential sites.

There I go again … talkin up the grapes!